Q: Haynes has seemingly taken radical shifts in direction from film to film. Is there a commonality that can be found in each of his works?

White: Roughly speaking, Haynes alternates between films about “rock’n’roll suicide” (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) and domestic melodramas (Safe, Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce). Then there are Poison and the TV short Dottie Gets Spanked, which make up a kind of early 1990s “New Queer Cinema” interlude. The music films are narratively complex mosaics whereas the family movies are linear, and that difference reinforces the pattern of alternation. It’s unusual for a filmmaker to split his work like this but of course it’s not a hard and fast division. There are numerous interconnections and one in particular comes to the fore in my book: it’s the drama of leaving home—which is both a specific story incident in almost all of Haynes’s films and something more symbolic. This ordinary life event takes on a larger metaphorical significance as a defining act of social noncompliance.

Home in Haynes’s films isn’t a happy place, even when it’s loving and protective. It’s a place of danger, especially for the misfit (though normality is tough too). Sometimes home is horrible or haunted—somewhere to get trapped or go mad. In perhaps the most powerful scene in the glam-rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine, away from all its music-industry glitz and glamor, the teenage Arthur (Christian Bale) is humiliated by his father. Soon afterward he escapes on a bus from Manchester to London, and while the scene is made poignant by the fact that his mother runs after the vehicle to wave goodbye, it’s a scene of liberation, temporary and insufficient though it proves to be.

A more complex example is the journey Safe’s Carol (Julianne Moore) takes from her affluent life in southern California to a recovery community in New Mexico. Her conventional life has become unendurable—the comfort of it has actually started to make her sick—but her search for something better is much more risky than she realizes. Through such stories, Haynes dwells on the fundamental political question of what it means (and costs) not to belong, and I very much wanted in the book to stress the
consistency, coherence, and seriousness of this preoccupation in his work.

Q: How useful is the “New Queer Cinema” label to describe Haynes’s work?

White: Haynes’s place in gay cinema is somewhat paradoxical and this goes for the narrower question of his affiliation to New Queer Cinema too. The difficulty is that Haynes doesn’t dwell on gay subject matter in the obviously direct (and oppositional) fashion of New Queer Cinema films like Greg Araki’s The Living End, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, or Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Haynes’s gay stories and characters are more ambivalent or tangential. For example, the men who have sex with men in the “Homo” storyline (adapted from Jean Genet) of Poison couldn’t be called role models. Then there’s tormented Frank (Dennis Quaid) in 1950s Far from Heaven, who meets a young man by the pool while on holiday and later admits desperately to his wife before he leaves her that only now does he comprehend what love is. Self-hatred and inhibition are burdens it’s hard to imagine ever lifting from him.

The problem is only resolved if “queer” is understood to be something that encompasses but goes beyond homosexuality itself. In a Film Quarterly interview published in 1993, a year after critic B. Ruby Rich baptized the New Queer Cinema movement, Haynes said: “People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film. . . . I think that’s really simplistic. Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?” Queer is perhaps most usefully thought about in relation to Haynes’s films not as a sexual orientation but as a general name for refusing social and artistic norms. (After all, gay people can be just as
conservative as straight.) Once the idea is broadened like this, the heroically rebellious queers in Haynes’s films include not only the centrally important character of Richie in Poison’s “Hero” story, a boy who kills his father and abandons his mother, but also Carol in Safe and even, perhaps, for a little while, Mildred (Kate Winslet) in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce.  

Q: Unlike many “serious” filmmakers, Haynes does not shy from melodrama. Why does he embrace this cinematic tradition?

White: Haynes’s relation to melodrama really needs a whole book to itself. Haynes inherits both from directors like Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls—emigrés who mastered the Hollywood domestic melodrama after World War II—and from the validation of their work in the 1970s by radical film critics and by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder as stinging critiques of the American mainstream rather than apolitical lightweight entertainment. (This question of the politics of melodrama continues to be debated, particularly in regard to Sirk: some insist that there’s no true subversive force in his films, though I certainly disagree.) Fassbinder updated Sirk in films like The Merchant of Four Seasons and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by making the attack on normality more explicit: the depiction of social cruelty and regimentation isn’t ambiguous in Fassbinder’s melodramas, as it mostly is in a Sirk film such as All That Heaven Allows. Haynes knowingly revives a lot of the Sirkian ironic varnish, but in full consciousness of and
affinity with Fassbinder’s less guarded reinvention.

Perhaps the crucial thing is that cinematic melodrama allows its exponents to play on
two boards: sympathetically exploiting the dramatic pathos of family strife at the same time as exposing the dark side of small-town conformism. Perhaps what appeals to such intelligent directors about melodrama is precisely that it can work in different and even conflicting ways at the same time. You can consider Far from Heaven, Haynes’s most direct homage to Sirk and Ophuls and Fassbinder, to be mainly a playful postmodern pastiche full of knowing allusions; you can be moved to tears by the characters’ struggles; or, as I do, you can regard the film as Haynes’s most hopeless and disturbing account of social entrapment. Maybe you can even do all three, and no doubt there are other alternatives too.

Q: You interviewed Haynes at length for the book: what struck you most about his responses?

White: There were three interviews, which were eventually edited together. The first two
occurred when the writing was underway, the last when it was nearly finished. Talking to the subject of a book of criticism is of course both rewarding and potentially inhibiting because of a certain “anxiety of influence.” Even by the high standards of many directors, Haynes is precise and persuasive about the intended meanings of his films—his DVD commentary tracks are particularly interesting and absorbing. (There wasn’t a commentary available on Velvet Goldmine for a long time, but fortunately for my research the 2011 Blu-ray edition put this absence right.) We discussed each of Haynes’s films, including his high-school effort (which unfortunately wasn’t available to view), The Suicide, and his graduation film, Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (which I did see and so could identify its traces in the subsequent Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There). As it happened, by the way, Haynes’s comments about Safe ended up being the most directly influential on my interpretation.

I decided after the first interview not to quote from these new discussions in my analyses. There were a couple of reasons for this decision. The first is that the commentary tracks have a particular immediacy—Haynes is there actually watching the film while commenting—that gave plenty of detail to engage with. The second is that to partition analysis and interview in this way offers the reader the opportunity to consider Haynes’s statements without my explicit commentary on them. The separation obviously isn’t complete, the interviews permeate the analyses, but I hope this decision makes the reader’s experience more interesting. In any case, at the heart of my sense of Haynes’s work are representations in his films of mysterious solitude and psychic remove—but I
think it’s fair to add that the author himself doesn’t stress these depictions to the same degree.

What was very interesting to me about the interviews was Haynes’s undiminished
commitment to a radical critique of society—for example, when he affirms the continuing inspiration of Jean Genet or says: “The society is telling you that if you do these things you’re gonna be fine, and everything’s good, and you’ll be accepted, but you never really believe it, and we’re haunted by that.” But such remarks aren’t surprising, finally. Of all his films, I’m Not There probably has the bluntest political edge and for a while it could have seemed like Haynes was mellowing. But then, in many ways unexpectedly, along came the really tremendous Mildred Pierce, which is as edgy and haunted as anything Haynes has made (and in many ways the best synthesis yet of the different strands of his work). It’s just a masterpiece and I absolutely relished the opportunity to write about it early on in its life.

*****

Photo courtesy of Rob White.

Phillips was the first woman to hold a principal chair in any major American orchestra when she was chosen by conductor Leopold Stokowski for a spot in the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930.

Read the book excerpt here: SymphonyNow – A Harpist in the Lion’s Den.

Photo: Edna Phillips.  Photographer unknown. From the family collection.

The interview ran on the March 9, 2013, broadcast of Only a Game.

Life of Pi

Shilpa Davé, author of the forthcoming University of Illinois Press book Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, writes about the “South Asian Invasion” of this year’s Academy Awards.

In an article for the South Asian American Digital Archive blog, Davé writes that Life of Pi wasn’t the only film recognized by the Academy in which Indian accents were thriving.

(Photo: Loren Javier, Flickr Creative Commons)

Professor Nettl’s works include Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology, which was called, “Light and entertaining, moving and head-noddingly simple without sacrificing the complexity of its implications. . . . Classic Bruno Nettl.” by the Journal of Folklore Research, and the classic introduction to ethnomusicology, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts, in its second edition.

Congratulations, Professor Nettl!

“RAY BRADBURY, the science fiction and fantasy author behind such classics as Fahrenheit 451, infamously claims to remember the details of his own birth. In 1920, he was born into an era of rapid scientific discovery – the advances of which inspired his long and fruitful writing career.”

Coincidentally, yesterday I was forwarded this article. It includes answers Bradbury sent to a young student asking questions about “New Criticism,”

“During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level, and need only be summoned forth in the heat of writing. . . . I trust my subconscious implicitly. It is my good pet. I try to keep it well fed with information through all my senses, but never look directly at it.”

A beloved teacher, he was also a passionate scholar whose work will endure.

A full obituary can be read at this site.

Yesterday I had an e-mail from Linda Pershing, and though her article on Carlos Arredondo and his memorial to his son was published in Journal of American Folklore almost two years ago, I remembered the facts of the story central to her research so clearly.

Carlos Arredondo’s son, Alex, was a Marine who was killed while serving in Iraq in 2004. His father’s grief was immense, immediate, and shocking; his reaction made national headlines. Carlos found an outlet in creating a portable memorial to his son and in protesting the war.

Linda Pershing’s message yesterday brought news of Alex’s younger brother’s death this week. Brian Arredondo committed suicide. Peace activist Cindy Sheehan issued a statement with more information.

I’m grateful for Linda’s work, which brought this family’s sad but not uncommon plight to my attention. May peace be with them.

Linda Pershing’s article about Carlos Arredondo and his mobile memorial appeared in Journal of American Folklore vol. 123, no. 488 (Spring 2010) and is available in Project Muse and JSTOR. Carlos Arredondo has been profiled by various media, including New York Times, CNN, and Democracy Now!.

In 2006, UIP published University of California, Santa Barbara professor Jane Duran’s Eight Women Philosophers. Recently, Prof. Duran contributed to the Winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education with an article titled “Education and Feminist Aesthetics: Gauguin and the Exotic.” Prof. Duran’s “Margaret Fuller and Transcendental Feminism” was subsequently published in the Spring 2010 issue of The Pluralist.

Speaking of The Pluralist, a large portion of the Fall 2010 issue will be devoted to Donna R. Gabaccia’s Coss Dialogue lecture, “Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?,” and the response papers that were presented at this year’s Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. A professor in the department of history at the University of Minnesota, Gabaccia has co-edited two books for UIP: Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (with Fraser M. Ottanelli) in 2005 and American Dreaming, Global Realities (with Vicki L. Ruiz) in 2006.

Prof. Leta E. Miller (of UC, Santa Cruz) is also a familiar name for both books and journals. Prof. Miller co-authored, with Fredric Lieberman, Lou Harrison (2006), a book about Harrison’s life, works, and his place in the history of twentieth-century American music, as well as Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer (2004). And now, Prof. Miller’s article, “Elmer Keeton and His Bay Area Negro Chorus: Creating an Artistic Identity in Depression-Era San Francisco,” will appear in the Winter 2010 issue of Black Music Research Journal.

I can’t neglect to mention Michael Hicks, composer, professor of music at Brigham Young University, outgoing-editor extraordinaire for American Music, and author of several UIP books (Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions [1999]; Henry Cowell, Bohemian [2002]; Mormonism and Music: A History [2003]). Word on the street is that he’s working on another book project with UIP, but until that book’s published, be sure to check out his swan song editorial, “The Threshing Floor,” in the Winter 2010 issue of American Music (for a taste, check out Heather’s blog post from June). Here’s hoping that he’ll pop up in UIP journals again soon.

So this blog post is getting very long. I know that I’ve missed many authors, many connections, but you get my point. It’s fun to work with authors that you might not have gotten the chance to work with otherwise. That’s why I hope that one day, my colleagues in the books department will get to work with Bill Ayers.

*It’s so intense!

Here is a recent message from author Jim Ballowe, whose Christmas in Illinois arrives later this year from UIP. Jim is writing to Gary Deneal, southern Illinois historian and editor of Springhouse magazine, about how Gary’s book connected Jim with a stranger at a wedding in Turkey. You can’t make this stuff up!

Ruth and I have just returned from a very good two-plus weeks in Turkey.    After walking through a great deal of history and seeing face-to-face a rather fascinating culture, we attended the wedding of a nephew this past Saturday evening.  At the wedding, which was on a boat on the Bosphorus, I had a conversation with a friend of the groom, a fellow from Austin, Texas.  When he learned that I was from southern Illinois, he began to talk excitedly about A KNIGHT OF ANOTHER SORT, saying that he had read it twice and was fascinated by Çharlie Birger and your treatment of him.   I thought you’d like to know that you have been extolled at the gateway to Asia.   Oh, yes, he even remembered that I wrote the foreword to the edition he read.  His mother-in-law, a professor of history, had given the book to him.

The book in question is A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger –a classic of southern Illinois true-crime noir that I read in its first edition at my grandmother’s house over 30 years ago. (I was also involved in the launch of the second edition while at SIU Press in the 1990s.)

From Illinois to the Bosphorus, and from a book that led to a conversation that led to an email that ended up on our blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed: good stories live on.